Network service plans have conventionally been developed by teams of technical specialists, each expert in the operation and programming of a respective subset of network appliances deployed to implement a given aspect of service policy. After the broad outline of a new plan offering is agreed upon, for example, separate teams of control policy and accounting policy specialists are typically tasked with developing control policies and accounting policies, respectively, required to implement the new plan, and programming individual network appliances to execute the control and accounting functions required by those policies.
Unfortunately, the divergent appliance-level destinations for control and accounting policy instructions tend to disjoin the development and implementation of those policies, yielding silos of development and implementation effort, which significantly slows the deployment of new service plans and often leads to less cogent plan design and implementation. New plans typically take many months and hundreds of development/implementation hours in the path from drawing board to implementation.